EFR 542: Doing Keto Right, Maintaining Metabolic Flexibility, and Being an Overall High-Performer with Rachel Gregory

Rachel: everything life nutrition training, it's, you know, with everybody, it's always adapting. And I think there was for sure, you know, as I move through periods of my life, things were changing. I guess the biggest example I could give would be like in grad school, I mean, sorry, in undergrad at Miami, I was I went to University of Miami for undergrad was got my undergrad in athletic training, and I also did triathlon. So I was on the triathlon team there. And then when I moved to Virginia, and knew that I wouldn't have that much time to train, I actually completely switched gears and joined a CrossFit gym. And so that was just like a whole different experience there with training. And just like, learned a lot there, you know, I started using, you know, CrossFit as kind of my outlet for, you know, just getting out of my own head with all the other stuff that I was doing. And then it eventually became something that I started studying for my thesis, which we can get into that study if you want. And then yeah, nutrition, I really just my nutrition has evolved. As I've, as I've learned, as I've made mistakes myself, as I've worked with clients, but in terms of just like transitioning between those different lifestyles, I think, you know, it all plays into it, right. And you experience different things, and you learn different things, and you grow from them. And I think it's all, it's all necessary. And one thing I do want to add to is, so I did when I graduated from high school, going into to my undergrad degree, I went in thinking that I was going to be an athletic trainer, like for the rest of my life, like I went to college, and I went to that program at University of Miami because I because it was one of the best in the nation for athletic training. And then I got like, into my junior year, and I was like, oh, wait, I really am interested in nutrition and interested in the strength conditioning side of things and so kind of completely switched gears there and realized that I didn't want to do that and so kind of just switched my path to pursuing Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. 

Chase: it sounds like we have some similarities there. And I'm sure someone listening can relate as well, you think you're starting down one path. And then as you're going down that path, you realize, oh, no, wait, I actually A don't really like this at all, or B, I just like a portion of this. And I want to pull from it, what I need what I want. Because I've found like the next layer, the next niche kind of thing, when I was going through undergrad, I was really adamant about pursuing corporate wellness, employee wellness, because I just thought that that demographic, that audience, if you will, that clientele needed the most help. But I ran through an internship about 300 hours and realize that that is not at all what I wanted to do, because they were also the least motivated group of people. And I realized very quickly then in there that I wanted to help others, I wanted to coach and train people, but I wanted them to already kind of be a little bit more beyond and that readiness to change. I wanted them there and ready to commit. I didn't want to have to, like try to chase them down in the stairwell to, to convince them to come to our health coaching session, you know.

Rachel: yeah, yeah, for sure but I mean, it's all like an experience, right? You learn so many different things, when you kind of take that and, you know, use what you learn for different experiences. And I think that's a lot of what I've also come to terms with the last year specifically, it's just like, being okay with changing my mind about a lot of things that I once believed or one thought was like, the way to go. And then I learned and I grew and I think you know, that is part of especially in the nutrition and training space, like new science is always coming out, things are always changing. There are ebbs and flows and like something that I probably said two years ago, I probably am completely against now or whatever it may be, and maybe two years from now, for sure, it's gonna be the opposite. So I think it just I think that's okay, though, to be able, and I think if someone you know, says that that's, you know, wrong or, you know, give you crap for that. It's like, well, if you're not, you know, making mistakes and changing your views and adapting and growing, then you're really just kind of stagnant and not learning. 

Chase: changing the mind has to come first when it comes to behavior change when it comes to if we're going to train if we're going to adopt a certain dietary protocol if we're going to change our training at all. For me, I'm curious if you can relate especially to in the last year and a half. I became fairly sedentary like a lot of people and it's because gyms closed I didn't have access to hardly any equipment. I was burning through every bodyweight workout that I could think of or fine and I just got honestly so bored and unmotivated and detached from honestly that kind of identity because I was so used to in love training in such a certain way that I thought if I can do what I like to do and can't do what I'm normally good at, I'm just not going to do it and just ride this thing out. But then I realized I was on the slippery slope to that becoming the new norm for me. And I would think back to so many times when I would be working with a client myself of a hole, I just, I stopped working out after my first kid, or I stopped working out after this job transfer, because A, B, and C and the next thing, you know, it's like a year, five years later, and you haven't trained at all. And that's a slippery slope to allowing these habits to kind of get out of your life. Did you experience that all? And or do you work with people in over the last year that you've had to focus more on changing your mind about how you train what you train when you train so that you can still achieve that end result you're after?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's something that I definitely struggled with, you know, throughout the pandemic, and I was same with you, I was, you know, going to the gym every day, you know, that was kind of my escape my the atmosphere that I, you know, thrived in, and kind of just being, you know, secluded at home, coming up with new, you know, home workouts. At first, I was just bummed. But then I kind of really actually took me just a, maybe a week or so to really flip the switch for my mindset to really think about because I was obviously working with a lot of clients as well who are feeling the same. And I had a coach, I have a coach of my own, and he helped me through this as well, it's just kind of really flipping your perspective, like, okay, let's focus on not what you can't do right now. But what you can do and how you can grow within that. So really, I mean, for me, just looking back when the, you know, whole pandemic started, like, I learned so much in terms of so many new exercise, and so many new ways to do things that were kind of out of the box, that I was able to implement myself, and then, you know, bring to my clients. And with all my clients really just like focusing, I focus, you know, so much on the overall picture, right? So when I'm working with a client, it's not just nutrition, it's not just training, it's really looking at all the other factors that are involved, because they all play into it. So you know, starting your day off with, like, a positive in a positive way, right. So whether that's through meditation, or journaling, or whatever it may be, and then, you know, building the building upon those habits and actually being held accountable to those. I think that was one of the biggest things. And that's what I helped a lot of, with my clients, we really took a mindset shift and like, okay, you know, I had some clients who weren't really didn't have any type of morning routine or anything like that, we started implementing that. And just like, literally starting the day off on a 10 minute positive note, and it's just crazy, like, what small the time period really can just like change the whole day, just how you start your day, right. And with that, 10 minutes, it can build up, you know, as you go, and it's really just like, you know, building that habit over time. It's something that I like, for myself, it took me a long time to implement that. And so I think it's, that's one of the biggest things is just like setting your day for success and like taking time, first of all, taking time for yourself. And this is something I work with a lot of women, a lot of moms a lot of, you know, busy women, and they're so used to putting other people first their kids, their husband, their partner, whatever it may be, and they just don't take the time to put themselves first. So literally telling them, hey, like, I want you to take 10 minutes every single day and actually be selfish, right? Be selfish and do something that is for you because if you can be selfish in that small period of time, it's actually not being selfish, because you're putting yourself first for that period of time. And then you're able to bring your best self to everybody else around you, if you just have you know, that 10 or 20 minutes, that's your time. And then obviously, that builds into, okay, if I have that small amount of time. Alright, let's build in maybe 45 minutes to get my workout in or 10 minutes to plan my day ahead of time in terms of my nutrition, and just like all of those different things kind of build upon each other. And you kind of realize like, okay, I set myself up for success, success, and now I can go help everybody else a lot easier. Knowing that I did you know, I put myself first for that small period of time. 

Chase: it's one of the oldest phrases but one of the truest you know, you got to put your air mask on the plane first before I can help anybody else. And you are used to helping so many people now as a coach and as a trainer yourself. But I wanted to go back if we could to kind of more the academic version of yourself. You actually were able to publish the very first human clinical study looking at Fat Loss and body read composition of the ketogenic diet. And you're actually specifically in a target group with CrossFit athletes. Right? It was just that to train in general or was it CrossFit? Like elite level stuff? Can we kind of define the population a little bit more?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. So it was literally the population was just your average, Joe women men going to a CrossFit gym. It was literally in Harrisonburg, Virginia Non elite. So just you know, moms and you know, a few men and people who are just dads, who are just looking to, you know, enjoy that environment while they're working out, you know that CrossFit community if you've ever been to a CrossFit gym or anything like that, you know, there's a lot of community there.

Chase: And because maybe is an understatement, communities, that's for sure.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, but there's a lot of positive vibes there, right. And it's exciting to go and to kind of challenge yourself against other people and with this particular population, and with this particular study, it was really looking at the body composition changes within these subjects. And that was kind of the premise going into the study.

Chase: Let's maybe just give a high level breakdown of what is the ketogenic diet. We do I'll make the blanket statement here I think a lot of CrossFitters do adopt a ketogenic diet or paleo my personal kind of observation, but now that we've kind of got the sample size down so all my CrossFit athletes out there listening tune in. So then what is the ketogenic diet? And what were you studying? And what did you find?

Rachel: Yeah, sure. So traditional and I definitely like to distinguish this because a lot of people especially if you've, you know, you're new to the ketogenic diet, or you're just going on Google and researching it, sometimes a lot of misinformation and, and just a lot of information in general can come up, but So a standard ketogenic diet is, was adopted for kids who had epilepsy, back in the early 19, mid 1900s, actually. And so that was a form of a standard strict keto diet where it's a very high fat, very low carb, low to moderate protein approach to your, you know, diet, right. And so it basically with the lower carb intake, it causes your body to go into a state of metabolic state called ketosis, where you're basically start to produce ketones as another fuel source, because your carbs are so low, your insulin is low, your blood sugar's low. So it allows your body to kind of tap into this different metabolic state that not most people are able to do because especially within the standard American diet, it's typically higher carbs. So you never really get to that state. All although a caveat there is that everybody is actually born in a state of ketosis. And as you're when you're a baby, you're actually pretty much in a state of ketosis because you're usually feeding off of high fat breast milk.

Chase: Yeah, but I've never just put two and two together there. That's a really interesting concept. So really, as humans, our first diet was keto.

Rachel: Yep. And even with a formula typically, like if you're getting a good fortune, it's continually going to be high fat, right? And if you just think back also to like, outside of our modern world, so like our ancestors, hunter gatherers, like they weren't, they didn't have access to food 24/7 They went through periods of, you know, you know, foraging and hunting and fasting and so their, their bodies went in and out of ketosis just because of necessity and this is really that concept and we can talk about this a little bit and it's something that I'm super passionate about right now is metabolic flexibility, just your body's ability to go back and forth between these different fuel sources right and that's kind of going back to you know, how our how we kind of our ancestors, you know, lives right versus having, you know, a grocery store or, you know, Starbucks I was at Starbucks, or delivery dudes, you know, coming to you every second of the day, like

Chase: every day, we get the ability to choose our diet, whereas back in the day, hundreds 1000s of years ago it was I'm gonna pick the diet of the one that I can actually get, if I'm hunting, if I'm hunting, if I'm hunting, if I'm hunting cool that I'm you know, I'm an omnivore I'm a carnivore, if I'm gathering I'm, you know, an herbivore, I'm a veg to vegetarian, maybe going keto. It was just, it was all just came down to survival. So I would love to get more into that, because I'm sure the metabolic flexibility of humans has drastically changed over the years.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, exactly and we can definitely go down that rabbit hole. I don't even remember your original question. So that's the standard keto diet, which with this study, kind of going back to the study, and with when I kind of talked about a ketogenic diet in, you know, the, I guess, quote, unquote, real world or for someone who is not suffering from a specific metabolic disease. So if you're not suffering from epilepsy, or you don't have like a severe metabolic issue, that that you're that's occurring, maybe, you know, you don't have severe insulin resistance, or diabetes, or whatever it may be, like, even with diabetes, like you don't necessarily need, like 90% of the people do not need to be following a strict keto diet where you're very, very high fat, and their protein is low, low as well. So going into this study, and just in general, I always kind of preface that because we were taking the approach, were really the only metric I gave these subjects and to focus on was just keeping their carbs low, and letting their protein and fat kind of fall where they fall where it may. And so that's kind of the thing I like to distinguish between because a lot of people, I guess, make the mistake of going super, super high fat, and really plummeting their protein, which is really a recipe for disaster, especially when it comes to any type of training and building muscle or maintain muscle or whatever it may be. So kind of going into this study, really, the premise was, okay, we had a standard American diet group, and we had a Keto group, randomly divided them into these two groups, we had about 32 participants. And it was a six week study. And basically, the keto diet group was told to just keep their carbs under about 50 total grams per day, and eat as much as you want, you know, a lot of people started to 

Chase: wasn't looking at calories, it was just looking only at carbs so just your caloric threshold could be as high as you wanted, or needed or normal but the only caveat was 50 grams of carbohydrate or less.

Rachel: Yep, exactly. And, yeah, and so that was one of the biggest things going into it that I wanted to make sure we did, because I wanted this to be more of a, although it was a controlled study, although we used we control that as much as we could obviously, that's, you know, another story, but I wanted to be a very real life situation. And knowing that these people were training four times per week in CrossFit, like I didn't want them to, to limit, you know, their protein or their calories. I wanted to see how that would like how going on into a ketogenic diet would, you know, if it would change their body composition and the fact of losing body fat while still maintaining or increasing their performance to the same degree as the standard American diet group?

Chase: That's a very concept; they're very interesting variable to look at. I think it's a very realistic one, I want to just give you, you know, praise for that. Because when we oftentimes look at studies in the health and fitness space, yeah, there are so many variables that are more or less unrealistic for the everyday person, you know, how could I ever think that I can have similar success or even the same success when every single aspect of their training, their diet, their environment, everything was so well groomed? But with this, it was no I can get behind that I can just maintain my normal diet, and I'm really just monitoring one variable. That's very realistic.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, exactly and so what was cool about the end results of the study is that although we didn't tell them, you know, to reduce their calories to a certain amount, because they, you know, after they kind of got through the first one, like one week of transitioning into a ketogenic diet, you know, we do know that with keto there can be a lot of appetite suppressant, a little bit less food focus and things like that. And so they just inadvertently reduce their calories. And we know that because at the end we got, we had them kind of track a few days throughout the weeks and then we kind of looked at all the data there compared to the control group, and we actually saw that protein on average protein between both groups was pretty much the same. Carbs were kind of average, right? So in the Standard American Diet group, it was higher, obviously, the Keto group was lower. And then calories actually, I don't know, remember the exact numbers, but calories were just lower in the Keto group, but not from a standpoint of like, hey, you know, just in this amount, it just kind of happened. And so we found that by at the end, and it was just a six week study, I would have loved for it to be longer. But it was actually only two years that I was able to do this. And that might sound like a lot of time, two years and only six weeks. But it's really, really not when you have to do all the other stuff that's involved

Chase: in clinical aspect especially 

Rachel: yeah. So at the end of the six weeks, we found that the ketogenic diet group was able to reduce significantly, it's just it statistically significantly reduced their body fat compared to the standard group, and they were able to increase their performance to the same degree that the standard group was able to do with the caveat that performance dipped a little bit within the first one to two weeks as they adapted to that keto diet. And then one more thing I want to mention here, though, as well is that this is a lot a big mistake, too. And this is one of the things that I personally think skews a lot of the research out there and things like that as electrolyte intake. So I

Chase: it's very common in ketogenic diet crowd supplementation with electrolytes to offset a lot of symptoms such as fatigue, the Keto flu, dehydration, headaches. 

Rachel: exactly. So I kind of that was another thing that I just made sure of that they were paying attention to, as they went into, as they transitioned into the ketogenic diet was, hey, like, you need to stay on top of your salt, like just salt every day on top of your sodium and your electrolytes. So salt, everything, make sure you're getting enough salt. And that was I think that made a huge difference in the kind of adaptation phase of that. So yeah,

Chase: speaking of actually, they were a former partner on the show, but still very good friends, I will put a link down in the show notes for everybody. If you want some of the best electrolytes I've ever tasted and found. It's just pure sodium, magnesium, potassium. Have you heard an element from Rob Wolf? Oh, insane. There's so good. I still use them daily. But so good and cannot hype enough the necessity of electrolytes. I think electrolytes is one of the, are one of those things that we often overlook, regardless of our dietary protocol or training protocol. Just so many people are deficient, especially magnesium, and magnesium is responsible for hundreds and hundreds of normal bodily functions. That if you're low, in one thing, one electrolyte well, you're actually low in a lot of bodily functions. So you know, again, tip of the hat to you on that as well.

Rachel: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love element. I think I was actually just sipping on the lime flavor earlier this morning. And yeah, and one of the one of the things I just want to mention before I forget about the study and just about CrossFit in general. And this is something that I get a lot of kickback on, you know, implementing a ketogenic diet in a CrossFit population. Like I said, from the beginning, it was a non elite CrossFit population. And their main goal actually wasn't to increase their performance, their main goal was to reduce body fat with it with exercise with CrossFit being just their form of exercise that they enjoy doing. And so I like to preface that, and then also preface that, if you ever been to a CrossFit class, most CrossFit classes, they're actually they're usually an hour long, and usually the last 10 to 15 minutes, or even just five to 10 minutes. That is the glycolytic part of that workout. Typically, the first 30 to 45 minutes is all strength and skill work. So I always like to say that because a lot of people give kickback, like CrossFit is super glycolytic, which it is in some in some forms, right in some aspects of it, especially if you're talking about like, the CrossFit Games and all of that. So it's extremely Yeah, yeah, but if you're looking at your average person going to a CrossFit class, you know, in their neighborhood, it's going to be that hour workout, but it's not going to be hour long of in that glycolytic state. It's going to be a very small amount of time typically so just something to kind of talk through as, as that can be a misconception a lot of the time.

Chase: Sure, sure. Yeah. Thank you for that disclaimer. And so I know that you also kind of have been looking at specifically another, we'll say demographic and you really narrowed it down into understanding and then interpreting for this group The uniqueness of what it means to be a female to what it means to be a female and to train. And just the I'll say, the ease that females have in some ways, in the stretching points, the growth points, the maybe things error Code here working against you as a female in terms of I want to be a high performer, I want to train regularly, I want to see results, I want to feel results and maybe I have a couple of different versions of success, you know, that's either going to be aesthetic that's going to be going for performance, or just kind of the longevity aspect. So what is so unique when it comes to women and training, please break down for us this muscle science for women?

Rachel: Yeah, for sure. So muscle science version comes out of a course that I offer with my good friend Ashley van Houghton. I don't know if you've heard of her the muscle Maven. So we put together this course, because we thought it was something that was missing in this community was just a course that was really just geared towards educating women on what it takes to change your body composition through building muscle, right? And how you know what that looks like and just going through all aspects of that. And so when we're talking about, you know, I get this question a lot men versus women, and what are the differences when it comes to training and nutrition, I always like to just say that, there really isn't that many differences, when we kind of break it down in terms of male versus female and training specifically, it really actually does come back to the individual, because within women, there's so many, especially from the clients I've worked with, there's so many individualities between women themselves. So I really like to look at it more so on an individual basis. And, and kind of preface that because a lot of people are like, Oh, women to train differently than men. And that's really not the case. The reason is, because we know that, you know, there are some studies that show that you know, and we know this from just overall we know that men typically have obviously more muscle mass, and they typically have you know, more power, more force, whatever it may be, versus women, we know that in certain studies, they show that, you know, trained, trained individuals trained women are able to potentially have a little bit more, be a little bit more fatigue resistance, or be able to handle a little bit more volume when it comes to training. And that's we've seen that in some studies but overall, just looking at kind of that aspect of it, it really does go back to the individual as well. And then also thinking about, you know, some people say in terms of anatomy, like women have, you know, narrower shoulders, and wider hips versus men, so they have to do different exercises. And we know that just from a practical standpoint, every single person has their own anatomy, right? Every single person has, you know, their own history, whether it's from injuries that change the way their biomechanics are or change their anatomy and change how they're structured. And so thinking about that, you have to think about, okay, you know, yeah, there may be some of those differences between males and females, but there's so many other differences between the individual and so really have to think back to okay, if there's a training difference, it's actually going to be for that individual and how they thinking to how they set up for their exercises that they're doing, you know, choosing the exercises that make sense for their biomechanics as an individual, not as a male versus a female. So I think that's just a big kind of misconception that's out there, in terms of the male versus female in terms of anatomy, and then thinking about, like, physiology side of things, and you know, males versus females, you know, we definitely have females obviously go through different cycles of their life, right. So, you know, we can talk about perimenopause, menopause, all of that stuff. And then obviously, different cycles every single month, right, so we have hormones that fluctuate to different degrees. And with that, there are some instances and some studies that show you know, with a female specifically within our cycle, there's may be some periods where she might be a little bit more prone to injury for a certain period of time during your cycle versus another period of time when she might actually be able to exert more force or, you know, handle more volume or more intensity, or why would

Chase: actually sorry to cut you off? Without just really that piqued my curiosity of certain times during a female cycle? They might be more prone to injury, or what else were you saying there? What is so unique about?

Rachel: Yeah, so just like how our hormones are fluctuating with estrogen and progesterone, there is some there are some studies and I say this lightly, because these are, when we're talking about studies, it's like, we have to really, really kind of, like take a step back and be like, Okay, this is a study done in, you know, a specific group of people that was baby, there was probably limitations and all of that, but just, you know, talking about the fluctuations in hormones that we, you know, that we incur over our, you know, cycle, right, so progesterone goes up at certain times, and estrogen goes up and down in certain times. And all of that can lead to potentially some of those different fluctuations and you know, sometimes as well people talk about like the nutrition side of things where, you know, you might be more insulin sensitive during certain periods of time, so you can handle more carbs versus you might be more insulin resistant. So you need to lower the carbs. With all that being said, though, in we have science, right? We have studies, but then we have, like anecdotal and we have practical. And so with myself, just over the years, I, I really tried to actually, again, going back to the individual, because I've kind of made the mistake myself and with certain clients where I try to fit my client into a certain box by trying to, to, you know, implant these different things throughout, you know, different, like, for example, a woman and she's going through different periods of recycle, and we're like, okay, let's, you know, increase carbs here, or decrease carbs here, or, you know, take a D load week here. And I found that, you know, just because the research says one thing that there for a lot of women there can be complete

Chase: opposite, they're still a human being, they're still variables of life. 

Rachel: exactly. So it's really, it all just comes back to that individual. And like, Really, the biggest thing that I've seen is just their overall stress load, as the biggest driver of like, what they can handle with their training and their nutrition, versus trying to like really pinpoint it within their cycle or within whatever, you know, period of time they're in. So I there are definitely, you know, things to think about. And as you know, as a woman, you know, goes throughout her life and goes through these different stages of life, things will change, hormones will change. But I think overall, it really does come back to the individual. And then also just having those kind of big rocks in place that we're that we're always thinking about. So making sure you know, as you're aging, you're getting enough protein, because we know that's something especially with women, a lot of women I work with, they come to me and they're severely under eating protein no matter what type of diet they're on. And we know that's super important, especially as you age to not only gain muscle, but to preserve muscle mass. And just, there are so many other things with within training nutrition that we can get into like kind of mistakes that I see a lot of women making when it comes to changing their body composition. But with the male versus female, just for wrap that up. Personally, I think it all definitely just comes down to that individual, whether it's looking at their anatomy or their physiology. And really just like you said, looking at that person's overall lifestyle, and where they're at and what their main goals are, and kind of titrating things based off of that in that individual. 

Chase: a little follow up question there, actually. So for the person hearing this right now, okay, I'm kind of hearing some things that might check some boxes with me and my lifestyle, my training, my stress, that was a big takeaway for me actually was besides the male female difference, it came down to just where is that female, particularly in the hormonal cycle, and we know, hormones affect to our benefit, or to our detriment. So, so, so many things when it comes to if we're seeing success in our aesthetics, or performance or longevity but I want to ask your opinion, here, your professional opinion, besides just that variant of I'm a male, I'm a female. And besides actually getting like an in depth metabolic panel, getting key biomarkers and getting things like that, what can the listener do right here right now to kind of just maybe a head to toe scan or a quick lifestyle assessment of okay, maybe these are some extra variables that are going to probably play a role into what you're talking about here.

Rachel: Yeah, for sure. So I think, you know, just thinking about, this is a big thing that I do with all of my clients. And I kind of talked about this, I think we were talking off air just looking at the person overall and like what is going on in their life and I like to track biofeedback metrics with all of my clients. And I think if we can get those things in check and make sure that like, I'll give an example. So we do we track like their obviously their sleep, right? Sleep every night is huge. And that's something that no one wants to hear like it. No one wants to hear. You have to sleep more, you have to get better quality,

Chase: I'll just say this, prioritize your sleep. If you prioritize your sleep, it will begin to fix itself.

Rachel: Exactly. Yeah. And it's, you know, a lot of people say, like, I'll sleep when I'm dead, or whatever it may be. I used to say that, but let's cancel that. Please. Cancel that. So sleep. So sleep is one of the biggest things no matter what you're trying to do with, with anything that is going to be like we need to prioritize that. And I think with women's specifically, just because I work with a lot of women and that is one of the biggest areas that we have to work on with a lot of my clients and I continue to work on it with myself. So just like your quality of sleep, your quantity of sleep looking at that and tracking it on a daily basis, versus just saying, oh, yeah, I think I slept you know, seven hours. I think it was okay. You know, but if you're not tracking if you're not measuring it the same, like what gets measured gets managed, right.

Chase: every body hands down the best Sleep tracker I found love this guy.

Rachel: Yeah, I actually don't have a sleep tracker. I actually, I guess I do now, because it's part of my bed. I have the eight sleep.

Chase: the eight sleep. Yeah, Matteo is the founder.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I've talked to him a bunch of times. So I have that. But personally, I like to just keep it as simple as possible. And so like, with my clients, we track, you know, hours of sleep, quality of sleep, like how you felt when you woke up how you felt during the night, those types of things like, did you wake up during the night because those can tell us so much. And if we have like, a week to look back on that data that will say, okay, you know, this night, or like, this night, you got horrible sleep, okay, what happened the next day, oh, my training absolutely sucked. Or I was like, super, super hungry. I was craving all these things. Oh, you got four hours of sleep, and you woke up like three times, those probably relate to each other. And so with that we track. We also track training, performance and recovery. So and I track these on a scale of one to five, right? Super, super simple like, one is basically horrible. And five is amazing. So sleep quality quantity, training, so recovery from training, your motivation to train. So how you felt going into your session, how you felt afterwards, tracking hunger and cravings throughout the day. So how hungry were you? What were your cravings? Like? Those types of things, you know, other metrics that we track are obviously like steps and macros and calories, and depending on the individual, and like what their main goal is and so those and then also, just mood right overall mood, right throughout the day and then that gives us a really good picture of what's going on. And I think that one of the biggest things too, and this is something that I've talked about recently is, you know, I do have some clients that are asking like, and think that they need to like get their hormones, they have to get like blood tests done and get all these fancy hormone tests. And like, I think that definitely has a place when you've exhausted looking at the big rocks and the things that are not as sexy as a Dutch test, or whatever it may be. But those are typically for 90% of people, even woman, like they're missing out on all of those things that once we can get those in place, like it tends to fix everything else. Because what people don't realize is like, your hormones are a reflection of what you're doing on a daily basis. They are quote unquote, you know, breaking with some people say like you have broken hormones, or they're breaking or they are, you know, adapting to what you're doing. So if you are severely restricting calories, and under eating for months on end, and overworking yourself and not recovering properly, like, yeah, your hormones are gonna respond in a negative way, because they're literally telling you to stop doing that. So when you fix that, right, when you start nourishing yourself, when you start, you know, stop overtraining and feeling like you have to train seven days a week, and, you know, go, go, go fix themselves and yeah, like, as you get older, there might, there might be a time in place for, you know, some maybe hormone replacement therapy, depending on where you are. But I think a lot of people are just missing, like the overall mark when it comes to that. And I think there's a lot of ways that you can address that before having to go down that other kind of rabbit hole.

Chase: Oh, absolutely. And speaking of missing the mark here, one other concept, I wanted to bring it with you directly. I think I've mentioned already a couple times. And that's when we embark on our training, we embark we choose, I'm going to do HIIT, I'm going to do powerlifting, I'm going to do f 45, I'm going to do CrossFit, I'm going to do yoga, whatever it is, we latch on to a form of modality of exercise, because well, personal reasons or ease or whatever. But then we often confuse the modality of exercise to the end result that we're after. So can you please break down for us these three parameters that are very important to be mindful of when we are training, and I'm not I'm not here to knock anybody's modality, whatever gets you going, keep going like adherence is the number one thing we're after for sure. But when it comes to training for performance training for aesthetics, and training for longevity, is it possible to have all three can we periodized one over the other and then eventually have all three? Like how do these really break down realistically for the general public?

Rachel: Yeah, so I think the first thing is just thinking back to like, you know, what your, I think like what you said, Can we periodized these and I think that's typically the best approach for most people. In terms of Alright, let's pick one specific goal for this period of time. And let's focus on that versus trying to and, you know, with longevity, that is kind of a whole other topic. But if we're talking about performance, longevity is

Chase: its own podcast, for sure. 

Rachel: But we're talking about performance versus aesthetics. I can never say that word. It definitely comes down in my opinion and because I've made this mistake myself, and I've seen a lot of other clients struggle with this, it's okay, what is our primary goal right now? And how are we supporting that? And how are we kind of looking at, okay? How do we set ourselves up for the best success and put ourselves in the best, and the most optimal place to achieve what that primary goal is. So just kind of thinking back to my personal experience so I spent many years doing CrossFit and I was like, when I first got into CrossFit is really just because I, that was the thing that I was excited about, I had some performance goals, I wanted to increase some things and in terms of like working on, you know, power cleans and snatches, and get more skilled at that went into a lot of Olympic lifting style things. And then I got to a point where I was like, oh, like, I kind of want to focus a little bit more on changing my body composition, in the aesthetic side of things. And I just continued to do CrossFit and continue to start to pay a little bit more attention to my nutrition, which definitely helped. But then I got to a point where, you know, CrossFit is a performance based sport. And so if you're looking to, you know, optimize and build as much muscle as possible, or optimize your body composition, in the sense of maybe, you know, losing body fat and building muscle, or, you know, body composition, or vice, like, individualized, right, so, you know, you have a specific goal of losing body fat, okay, let's focus on the nutrition side of things, you have a specific goal of building muscle, okay, we need to put you in the best possible training situation to build as much muscle as possible, which is going to be obviously through hypertrophy training, and focusing on progressive overload and all of that, and not that you can't do that within CrossFit

Chase: time under tension, all those examples, we know that just work for us. 

Rachel: exactly. Yeah. So I think and then when it comes to, you know, orange theory, and F 45, and these kind of circuit style classes, which I think you could also kind of mix CrossFit into that, because CrossFit, you know, it's kind of obviously a hybrid, you have schoolwork and strength work, but then you have, you know, your met cons and things like that. So it's more of a hybrid, but with orange theory, and F45 these are circuit style classes, and I would kind of put them all in the same category. And with that, I think one of the biggest things that people are missing with that is that there is no way to really track your progression, like with an orange theory class, you're just doing so many different things all the time. And you're switching things up all the time. Which is BS, right? So I think it's like, you have to and I actually made this transition myself, I actually got injured when I was doing CrossFit and I was forced to take a break from it, and forced to actually take time off and then transitioned into more of a bodybuilding style hypertrophy program. And that is where I saw like the most changes in my body composition. I was like, okay, yeah, this makes sense. Like, I was trying to, you know, use CrossFit to change my body composition towards the end, and it just wasn't working. And I also just wasn't recovering. And I think that's one of the biggest mistakes, I made. A lot of my clients especially. Yeah, especially like, I work with a lot of kind of, quote, unquote, type A woman and I was, and I'm probably still one myself, but it's like, we just want to go, go, go all the time. If you know, training four days a week is good than training, five is better, or training six is better, which is not the case, right. And this is something that took me a long time to learn is like, you're not, especially if you're trying to change body composition, you're trying to build muscle or lose body fat, or whatever it may be, you have to give your time, yourself time to recover. And that's one of the biggest mistakes, especially if we're thinking about like how your muscles actually grow. Like they're not growing in the gym, right? You're literally breaking your muscles down when you are lifting weights, or when you're at whatever workout you're at,

Chase: actually, you're on when you're asleep. So let's go back to our example. Okay, there we go.

Rachel: Exactly. So I just think that that's a huge thing. And then, you know, just overdoing it with high intensity training, high intensity interval training, that type of thing can be like, especially if you're, if you are a woman who's looking to maybe lose some body fat and you are just going, you know, you're doing hit training all the time, you're just not giving your body time to recover. You're always kind of in this chronic high stress, cortisol, cortisol is all over the place. That is just a recipe for disaster because we know like sprint, like just for an example, if you're trying to lose body fat, and you're putting yourself into a crap calorie deficit, you're inevitably not going to have enough recovery resources to manage all these things. So you're just kind of digging yourself a hole with going you know, more cardio more whatever it may be, and not sleeping and not you know, getting enough protein and all that. So, there's a lot of kind of mistakes within there. But I think one of the biggest things is just realizing like, take a step back and realize that like, you don't have to be dead on the floor after every workout, right? Especially, you know, just with if you're coming from a CrossFit background like that isn't really the goal, especially if your goal is to change your body composition, because you don't want to be just running yourself into the ground every single day, because you just won't recover. 

Chase: yeah, thank you so much for that reminder. Yeah, we don't have to cheat death every workout in order to count it as a successful one. That's for damn. Rachel, this has been so great having you on the show. And as we begin to kind of wrap up here, I just want to, you know, acknowledge your work, and clearly so knowledgeable around these performance and nutrition protocols, once we get really clear on our goals, and I think that is so important. And such a great reminder for me, as well, as you know, the person listening to, before you decide to keep going with what you're doing, or to pick something new to do is to first figure out who are you the individual, the bio individuality, of training of nutrition of whatever is so, so, so important. So take an assessment of who you are, and then figure out what you want, and then find a way to execute it. There are 1,000,001 ways to skin the cat here, when it comes to aesthetics, performance, longevity, whatever your goal is. 

Rachel: Yeah, I love that couldn't agree more. 

Chase: To ask the final question here, this is what we're all about here at ever afford is to bring awareness into these key areas of our life that can help us move forward in a direction the direction of our design. So what does that mean to you, Rachel, how would you say that you live a life ever forward?

Rachel: Yeah, that's a great question. So I mean, I would just say that the biggest thing for me is just always continuing to, you know, put myself in situations where I can get a little bit uncomfortable and learn from that, right. So you know, one of the things that I like to talk about within my chain and within my kind of my brand is Met flex life and living a metabolically flexible lifestyle, and being able to, you know, certain things and kind of training your body in your mind to be resilient, right. And to kind of have I like to say this kind of be anti fragile, right? So you can, you know, go through these things and resist what's happening, but also grow from it right and, and learn from it. And so, that's one of the biggest things that I would say, is just continuing to learn with everything and grow. And we were kind of talking about this before, like, being okay with changing your mind on different things, especially when it comes to nutrition, and training and being okay with saying, yeah, I was wrong about that. I or I, you know, go against what I said a few ago, or whatever it may be, because if you're doing that, then you're just always growing and I think that is super important, especially when it comes to nutrition and health and all that. 

Chase: I love your little concept there of in order for our lives to move forward. In order to live a life ever forward, it often means looking back and recognizing where we were wrong, or where we need to now focus our attention, our studies, our lifestyle, because in order for us to move forward in life, a lot of times it means disconnecting from maybe some tethers that we have still holding us back to no fault of our own, but we change life. There's Periodization to life. Absolutely and we change science changes. And it's a constant, constant process for sure absolutely. Rachel, I have all of your information down in the show notes for everybody. But if they want to just dive deeper into your work right now, where can they go? Where can they connect with you?

Rachel: Sure. So I have my own podcast. It's called Met flex and chill. You can find it on YouTube or any podcast, by the way. Yeah. And then Met Flex life.com is my website where everything is housed. I have my podcast there blogs, recipes, programs. Two of my main programs are my Keto program and my muscle science for Women program that we talked about a little bit. So those are both three month programs and their cue form is more nutrition based muscle science room is more training based and all the information is on my website. And then I guess social media most active on Instagram. My handle is at Rachel Gregory dot CNS.

Chase: Amazing. Well, Rachel again, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much. You guys definitely want to check out more of her work to dive into the science but also the anecdotal. Both service just it's depending on who you are and what you want, like I said earlier.

Rachel: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

Chase: For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to everforwardradio.com